BladeSystems Insight Review - Part 2 - Day two.
I didnt have the opportunity to post as much as I would have liked but Martin at bladewatch.com seemed to take care of this for all of us.
The last day was jam packed full of content from power, switch and server vendors. The break-out sessions that where arranged seemed to give a good amount of one-on-one time with end users and the vendors.
I had the pleasure during two of the sessions to represent the case study portion for IBM BladeCenter platform and the Ardence software streaming solution. Overall it went well butvery hard to pack all the positive points to this solution in 20 min. I am sure after my audience had to hear almost the same thing in two separate days they had plenty of insight. =)
The early morning sessions brought out some great topics and we continued to hammer on the power issues at hand including cooling.
After lunch was one of my favorite things to listen to in the entire event. Andreas Antonopoulos, in my opinion was right on with his overview of how the market is progressing and the use of blades and virtualization is a new way of thinking. This ranged from QA environments, hardware abstraction layers, security issues and he touched on about everything that we have done so far within our environment. He also commented that some companies inadvertently overlook some of the new models and only view virtualization as a directserver hardware savings (CAPEX Savings). We did the same thing but started realizing many benefitsthat we overlooked after moving to a new approach and freeing up admin time. This new way of thinking — shifting resources as needed without over provisioning was new to the market and still continues to show massive OPEX savings as we spend less time maintaining touch points that relate to a direct expense.
The night followed with a great dinner, live entertainment and a great comedian. This had to be one of the more entertaining wrap-ups and award show that I have seen in a conference. PPM Media did a great job with this show and it was a blast attending.
Wait! We are not done yet …
After the dinner was a great show of fireworks that I would say rival some of the 4th of July shows I have seen in the past. This was amazing standing on the water in front of the hotel watching this show as huge cargo ships drive pass. It was a great touch to the live music also playing all and all a great end to BladeSystems Insight.
